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Reuters Plans to Lay Off 5% of Newsroom Staff

Turmoil continues at Thomson Reuters after the company announced on Wednesday that it was laying off staff members.

“To simplify and strengthen the Reuters news operation, we are making changes that will result in a slightly smaller editorial staff, but one that is more strategically positioned and better equipped to help Reuters report and deliver the news that matters most to our customers and society as a whole,” a spokeswoman, Barb Burg, said in a statement.

The cuts, which are expected to affect about 150 employees, or 5 percent of the newsroom staff, follow an announcement late last month that the company was scrapping its plans to expand into consumer news through a two-year old program called Next.

As details of the layoffs became known, former employees took to social media to share their complaints about how much morale has suffered at the organization. One departing longtime Reuters employee, Martin De Sa’Pinto, wrote a memo to his colleagues earlier this week that was widely circulated on TalkingBizNews.com and the journalism site jimromenesko.com. Mr. De Sa’Pinto said it was “something of a relief to be leaving the organization, as the level of politics and maneuvering had become far too grating for a person like me.”

Correction: October 3, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the media news Web site. It is jimromenesko.com, not romanesko.com.